UCL Promotor : Bernard Piraux
External collaborators : Yuri Popov (U. Moscow), Javier Madroñero (U. München), Francisca da Mota-Furtado (U. London) and Patrick O'Mahony (U. London)
The role of the Coulomb potential in the interaction of atoms with strong infrared fields where ionization occurs predominantly because of a tunneling process, is not fully understood. We study this problem by means of a one-electron model atom. It is based on the solution of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation in momentum space where the kernel of the non-local Coulomb potential is replaced by a sum of separable potentiels, each of them supporting one bound state of atomic hydrogen.